Developers need to be clear in their communication with gamers.

Informed consumers routinely go into game purchases armed with dozens of previews, reviews, and pages of forum chatter shaping their decision. For many gamers, though, the decision of whether to buy or not is made solely on the basis of the back-of-the-box ad copy or its modern-day PC equivalent—the Steam description page. So when that page starts making promises the game itself can't keep, those buyers are going to be justifiably angry.

Such was the case this week with Hammerpoint Interactive's The War Z (not to be confused with ArmA II mod Day Z), which hit Steam on Monday and quickly became the top-grossing game on the service. That success was thanks in part to an impressive list of features listed on the Steam page, including persistent worlds of up to 400 square kilometers, private servers, "dozens of available skills," and "up to 100 players per game server."

Too bad none of those things were actually in the game that thousands of people spent $15 or more to buy. These and other issues with the initial Steam release have led to widespread player outrage on forums like Reddit, NeoGAF, and Steam itself. The complaints have gotten so bad that Steam has "temporar[ily] removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build."

“There's no such thing as 'Release'”

In an interview with GameSpy, Hammerpoint Executive Producer Sergey Titov offered a limited apology to players angry about the Steam listing, which he says included both current features and some planned for future updates (the Steam page was updated a day or so after launch to clarify this distinction). He also suggested the vast majority of players were satisfied with the game and that only a few misinterpreted what was meant by the Steam description.

Titov defended the initial Steam listing as technically accurate. While the game allowed only 50 players per server at first, for instance, Titov noted private servers are able to host the promised 100 (those servers were later opened up to the public). And while the Steam listing implies multiple, huge worlds of up to 400 square kilometers, Titov said that the single, initial map does indeed fall in the low end of the promised "100 to 400 sq. km" range (though there's some reason to doubt that estimate as well). A couple offorum threads on the official War Z forums offered more apologies alternating with brittle defensiveness.

GA screenshot from The War Z's Steam release clearly shows parts of the game still labeled as "alpha functionality."

In any case, Titov's main defense was the relativistic claim that an online game like this is never really "finished" in the way that a retail game of the past might have been. "My point is—online games are [a] living breathing GAME SERVICE," he told GameSpy. "This is not a boxed product that you buy one time. It's [an] evolving product that will have more and more features and content coming. This is what The War Z is."

After offering The War Z as an alpha release for pre-orderers in October (and as a closed beta earlier this month), the version that hit Steam on Monday is what Hammerpoint considers a "Foundation release." The developer said it's ready for sale. But that semantic distinction still isn't noted on the Steam page, and it doesn't mean the game is complete. "There's no such thing as 'Release' for an online game," said Titov. "As far as I'm concerned The War Z is in stage when we're ready to stop calling it Beta."

This isn't a sufficient defense for lying to (or at least misleading) players about your game's current feature list, of course. But statements like these reflect a recent reality that should be familiar to most gamers: the game you buy on launch day is rarely the final version of the game. Even AAA titles are often faced with massive patches that fix issues found between the time the game was "released" and the day it was finally "completed" (see Assassin's Creed III for just one recent example). Aside from fixing glitches, post-release patching might turn the game you bought into a different game entirely through gameplay re-balancing and tweaking.

By and large, gamers are by now used to this "release first, patch later" world. But the scale of the difference between what is promised and what is initially delivered seems to be increasing. Social and mobile game developers now routinely discuss releasing games when they have a "minimum viable product," meaning a barely playable game that will be updated constantly as it attracts early adopters, often using live player data to guide the continuing design process. Massive success stories like Minecraft have made millions selling what were clearly labeled as "alpha" and "beta" versions of the game with vague promises about when the "final" release would hit. Kickstarter lets people essentially purchase pre-orders of games that often exist only as vaguely described concepts, going well beyond the more limited retail pre-orders for nearly complete physical games of the past.

The difference between “finished” and “complete”

Enlarge/ Many players felt misled after buying Cortex Command when it was still "unfinished."

The line between a game that is still being developed and one that is ready to be sold and played by the buying public is fuzzier than ever. And this isn't the first time that fuzzy line has led to controversy on Steam. In September, Cortex Commandhit the service and immediately faced loud complaints from players upset that the $20 game they had purchased was still unfinished. While the developer's own sales page tells potential buyers in bold letters that the game is a "work in progress," the Steam description meekly notes near the bottom that the game is "still being improved" and is "not in a completely polished state yet."

In light of the controversy, Cortex Command's developers issued a lengthy FAQ that gets into some pretty minute semantic territory about the game's development status. "To me, a 'finished' game is totally done and won't really be touched again by its developers, ever (save for ports, etc). 'Complete' means it is fully playable..." the FAQ reads in part. "On one hand, calling a piece of software '1.0' strongly implies completeness. On the other hand, to me it's also still only the very first revision that is fully usable," it says later.

This is the world we live in now, where developers have to make a distinction between "playable" and "complete." Making that distinction requires a new, heightened level of communication between developers and players about the precise, current state of the game being sold, a standard The War Z definitely failed to achieve.

For its part, Valve apologized for letting The War Z onto its service before fully vetting it. "From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of War Z for sale via Steam," a spokesman told Ars. "Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here."

That's all well and good for this situation, but it seems clear that Valve needs to update its guidelines for how "finished" a game needs to be before it can hit Steam. It should also provide rules to developers for to describe unfinished games on their Steam pages. This is especially true as Steam opens its service up to approved Greenlight games from developers that often don't have the same proven track record or internal quality standards of major developers (some Steam users are already complaining about games being greenlit before they're sufficiently done). Perhaps an update to the Steam refund policy—offering players their money back within a short time after the first time the game is played—would alleviate some of these issues (Valve currently makes it nearly impossible to get a refund on most purchases made through Steam).

Regardless of the precise fix, Valve needs to address these issues in order to maintain its rock-solid integrity as the most trustworthy and reliable downloadable game delivery service on the Internet. This isn't the last time an issue like this is going to come up. Valve should be more prepared for it next time.

Promoted Comments

I purchased "Ravaged" recently. Upon purchase, there was a disclaimer on the opening splash screen that instructed me to go into my game directory and change the name of one of the files (which would have to be done EVERY SINGLE TIME I attempted to log-in and play it). Fortunately, there was patch recently released which fixed this issue, but there was absolutely NO mention of this when I purchased it on the Steam page. Based on this experience and the unsettling info in this article, you can bet it'll be a cold day in Hell before I go anywhere near any of their "Greenlight" games until they can prove their quality control issues are revised.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.